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+---
+status: open
+opened: 2026-09-01
+located-in: [mesh-control]
+fixed-by:
+amended-design:
+---
+
+# 029 — The artifact store cannot be delivered by the artifact store
+
+## Symptom
+
+A mesh that has just bootstrapped cannot install a registry. The module describing one resolves,
+composes and pushes; the build never completes, because there is nowhere to put what it builds.
+
+It has never been seen, because the lab always has a registry standing before the mesh asks for
+one, and so does any mesh built on a machine that already had one.
+
+## What it actually blocks
+
+Not "a registry cannot be installed" — **a mesh cannot hold its own modules.**
+
+The artifact store is one store for everything a module ships: images, and archives, which are
+directories from a module's repository packed and pushed as content-addressed blobs. So it is the
+mesh's module catalogue in artefact form, and the same role a separate object store plays in the
+arrangement being replaced.
+
+Until it exists, a module can be described and resolved but nothing it carries can be kept
+anywhere. A mesh that has just bootstrapped can therefore run only what its bundle already holds.
+
+## The cycle
+
+Three facts, each correct on its own:
+
+- **A registry module's image is mirrored in.** `kind: upstream` pulls the reference the module
+  names and pushes it under a name of the mesh's own, so what a machine fetches is pinned by a
+  digest this mesh assigned rather than by a tag somebody else can move.
+- **The builder publishes to the artifact store**, learned from its `artifact-store` binding —
+  the same binding any consumer of any provision gets.
+- **The builder refuses to run without one**: *"a built artifact nobody can fetch is not built."*
+
+So installing the thing that provides `artifact-store` requires something that provides
+`artifact-store`.
+
+## Why the design already answers it
+
+The substrate record asks of each candidate *can it grant itself the thing it provides?* The store
+cannot create its own database; the broker cannot create its own virtual host; and the registry
+**cannot grant itself a repository**. That is why the registry is substrate by role.
+
+The same sentence answers this. A module that provides the artifact store cannot be delivered
+through the artifact store, so its image is not the mesh's to mirror — it is named directly and
+pulled from upstream exactly once, which is what the bundle already does for the three images a
+first node starts from.
+
+## The fix
+
+**The registry module names its image, and is never built.** A container naming
+`registry@sha256:…` needs no builder, no binding and no store. Every module after it mirrors
+normally, into the registry now running.
+
+Nothing new is required: naming an image directly is what most modules do.
+
+## What it costs, and what it does not
+
+The machine running the first registry needs to reach a public registry once, to pull that one
+image by digest. That is already true of a first node, which fetches three images the same way
+before a mesh exists.
+
+It does not weaken pinning. A digest is exact wherever it came from; what mirroring adds is that
+the mesh keeps its own copy and does not depend on a tag somebody else controls. For one image, on
+one machine, once, the bundle already accepts that trade and says why.
+
+## The constraint this puts on a registry module
+
+**A module providing `artifact-store` may not build artifacts of its own** — not its image, and
+not a user interface or a tool server shipped beside it. There is nowhere to put them until it is
+running.
+
+A registry that wants more than the upstream image is therefore two modules: one that provides the
+store and only names an image, and an ordinary module beside it that builds whatever else and
+mirrors it in the normal way. That is a real limit on how a registry module can be written, and it
+should be said out loud rather than discovered.
+
+## How it is checked
+
+A manifest that both provides `artifact-store` and declares built artifacts is refused where it is
+written, naming the cycle. Otherwise the fault surfaces as a build that never returns, on a mesh
+too new to have anybody watching it.